image: S. Hoy“Their schoolbags were puddled around their socks, forgotten”
It’s a brisk winter evening. Coming out of Japanese class, we crossed the plaza beneath the tall silver arch that stretches from the keitai[1] shop to the dilapidated tiled alcove containing a Doutor[2], a boba-tea shop[3], and a small, bright toy-train jungle gym usually surrounded by a smattering of grandparents resting with their shopping, while their young charges cavort on the astro-turf. More lonely a place than before, now that the Tokyu Hands[4] has closed up shop and moved down the road. We happened on two pubescent boys in middle school uniforms with navy blue short-pants sharing a tentative, tender kiss. One was touching the other’s hair at the side of his face, just barely. Their schoolbags were puddled around their socks, forgotten.
PDA is fairly non-existent in Japan: the most you usually get is some hetero hand-holding - and then only with young couples. And regular gayness isn’t seen much, even in ultra-modern Tokyo. Though you’re likely to see a flaming transvestite if you wander Shinjuku’s Kabuki-cho[5], the sighting of non-theatrical same-sex public affection is extremely rare.
Add this to the fact that our little outpost of Machida[6] isn’t exactly the center of hipster Tokyo, and that the lovers were probably pre-teen.
I don’t know those young boys, but I know that adolescent love and desire is hard enough to reckon with when you’re straight. With all the other factors compounding the difficulty, we felt as though we had stumbled across something special happening.
Hang tough, young men.
referenced works
- Cellphone. ↩
- Lower-end coffeeshop that can be found near almost every train station in Tokyo (if not, their rival Veloce have probably beaten them to it). ↩
- Sweet tea with milk (or should that be milk with tea) and gummy balls made of tapioca flour. Also known as "pearl milk tea" (珍珠奶茶) in Taiwan, where it originated, or just tapioca tea here in Japan. ↩
- A supersized "department store" that is either a true emporium of miscellany, or a logistical Babel, depending on your perspective. If Tokyo's snootier serecto shoppu have editorializing buyers trying to promote a curatorship of taste, Tokyu Hands is the reverse, aspiring to include absolutely everything, in order to become a kind of universal archive of Stuff. ↩
- A warren of narrow streets housing various sketchy propositions controlled by yakuza cartels, despite being named for a respectable traditional Japanese art form. ↩
- Machida is a city in western Tokyo on the Odakyu line. It's a nice mix of swish and down-market. ↩
location information
- Name: the arch in HaraMachida
- Time of story: late night
- Latitude: 35.540636
- Longitude: 139.448999
- Map: Google Maps
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